By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

A $5.2 million bounty is strong incentive to track down a living author. But what if the writer is already dead? Blow up his tomb. That was the threat posed by the shadowy Guardians of the Revolution against Dante Alighieri's monument in Ravenna, Italy. More than 600 years ago, the poet of the Divine Comedy placed the prophet Muhammad in the eighth circle of hell, "cleft from chin to the part that breaks wind." The Guardians turned out to be a local prankster. "It was only a joke," he said at his arrest. Consign him to the Inferno!